Monday, April 14, 2014

My English in the World talk at Saint Louis University addressing the intersections of technology, science fiction, and monsters.

A key question in science fiction specifically and, I think, in our culture at large, concerns the human relationship with the nonhuman. We are concerned about the shapes of these relationships as well as the possibilities of these relationships as such. Buried within these concerns is a more general anxiety about the very boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. Such concerns manifest an ongoing anxiety about the place of the human in the world. Monsters of all shapes and sizes are thus symbols and stand ins for this general anxiety. The human/not-quite-human intersection that forever threatens the very limits of what makes a human a human.

about _monster

Pure_Sophist_Monster is Nathaniel Rivers, an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Louis University. _Monster teaches rhetorical theory and writing at the undergraduate and graduate levels. _Monster's areas of interest in include Rhetorical Theory, History of Rhetoric, Public Rhetorics, Composition, Professional and Technical Communication, Computers and Writing, Philosophy of Mind, and Neuroscience and Humanities. Please visit www.nathanielrivers.com for more information.

focus & direction

As this blog's title suggests, a majority of the posts will address issues of sophistry, a term we can roughly equate with rhetoric (although not unproblematically). Sophistry is a particular kind of rhetoric and most understandings of it are pejorative. The historian of rhetoric Susan Jarrett says that the sophists have historically been seen as "arch-deceptors, enemies of Truth, manipulators of language" (xi Rereading the Sophists). Viewed less pejoratively (and more productively), however, we can say that the sophists were committed to an understanding of truth and values as (culturally and situationally) contingent, and that they were invested in language as means of navigating these contingencies. For many of the sophists (a group that is hard to define through time), the human experience is defined by flux and the possibilities for transformation.

This thoroughly sophistic blogs hopes to address particular contingencies (political, historical, bodily, and environmental) and to do so genuinely and generously.

why the crow?

The image of a crow adorns this blog because of its association with a founder of ancient Greek rhetoric, Corax of Syracuse, whose name means "crow."